New Forerunner 645: 1st Garmin GPS Watch That Can Store Music

This year Garmin’s announced, “Forerunner 645 watch” can store music locally on the watch and can be paired with Bluetooth headphones so that users can run without their phone and still listen to music.

Garmin’s are a big competitor to other smartwatch manufacturers as for when others are figuring out how to stream music from our tiny wrist-computers, Garmin is catching up to the times and starting to offer music storage on its GPS watches. Garmin’s wristwatch fit bands competitors, from TomTom to Polar to Apple to Fitbit, have offered some form of local music storage or offline playlist downloads before. Apple and Samsung even do music streaming now from their flagship watches.

Although the watch music capabilities appear somewhat basic it can easily and ideally store up to 500 music files, either transferred from a computer or downloaded as offline playlists from streaming services. The songs may be streamed either from Deezer and iHeart Radio but one of the drawbacks is that it doesn’t work with other popular streaming services in which the most favored one missing is Spotify (A windows 10 feature most popular for streaming music on large scale)

Recently, A Garmin spokeswoman said the company has just been waiting for the right time, and that “technology advancements and increased customer interest both came into play when making the decision to add music.” Some of Garmin’s old version watches have had music control, which means users may use the watch to play or pause songs that are playing on their phone. But a feature that may play music directly has been requested by many of the users from Gramin.

Specification:

The fit wrist watch has an inbuilt GPS and GLONASS and wrist-based
heart rate sensors.

Features such as keeping track of running, cycling, swimming, with a few
of Garmin’s more advanced training features like training load and
anaerobic training effect integrated into the software.

Better outlook features than Forerunners past with a fine quality
stainless steel metal bezel, a glass face, and an always-on display.

The battery life with last up to seven days with normal usage and up to
five hours in GPS mode.

Tap to pay feature: the company’s rolled out NFC tap to pay feature will
work with Garmin Pay works with Garmin watch only.

It’s shipping now and will cost $450. A version of the same Forerunner watch without music will cost $400.